style="font-size:15px;"> And in that interval there has now been discovered something which we call opinion?
There has.
Then what remains to be discovered is the object which partakes equally of the nature of being and not-being, and cannot rightly be termed either, pure and simple; this unknown term, when discovered, we may truly call the subject of opinion, and assign each to their proper faculty, the extremes to the faculties of the extremes and the mean to the faculty of the mean.
True.
This being premised, I would ask the gentleman who is of the opinion that there is no absolute or unchangeable idea of beauty – in whose opinion the beautiful is the manifold – he, I say, your lover of beautiful sights, who cannot bear to be told that the beautiful is one, and the just is one, or that anything is one – to him I would appeal, saying, Will you be so very kind, sir, as to tell us whether, of all these beautiful things, there is one which will not be found ugly; or of the just, which will not be found unjust; or of the holy, which will not also be unholy?
No, he replied; the beautiful will in some point of view be found ugly; and the same is true of the rest.
And may not the many which are doubles be also halves? – doubles, that is, of one thing, and halves of another?
Quite true.
And things great and small, heavy and light, as they are termed, will not be denoted by these any more than by the opposite names?
True; both these and the opposite names will always attach to all of them.
And can any one of those many things which are called by particular names be said to be this rather than not to be this?
He replied: They are like the punning riddles which are asked at feasts or the children’s puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat, with what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat was sitting.1 The individual objects of which I am speaking are also a riddle, and have a double sense: nor can you fix them in your mind, either as being or not-being, or both, or neither.
Then what will you do with them? I said. Can they have a better place than between being and not-being? For they are clearly not in greater darkness or negation than not-being, or more full of light and existence than being.
That is quite true, he said.
Thus then we seem to have discovered that the many ideas which the multitude entertain about the beautiful and about all other things are tossing about in some region which is half-way between pure being and pure not-being?
We have.
Yes; and we had before agreed that anything of this kind which we might find was to be described as matter of opinion, and not as matter of knowledge; being the intermediate flux which is caught and detained by the intermediate faculty.
Quite true.
Then those who see the many beautiful, and who yet neither see absolute beauty, nor can follow any guide who points the way thither; who see the many just, and not absolute justice, and the like, – such persons may be said to have opinion but not knowledge?
That is certain.
But those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be said to know, and not to have opinion only?
Neither can that be denied.
The one love and embrace the subjects of knowledge, the other those of opinion? The latter are the same, as I dare say you will remember, who listened to sweet sounds and gazed upon fair colours, but would not tolerate the existence of absolute beauty.
Yes, I remember.
Shall we then be guilty of any impropriety in calling them lovers of opinion rather than lovers of wisdom, and will they be very angry with us for thus describing them?
I shall tell them not to be angry; no man should be angry at what is true.
But those who love the truth in each thing are to be called lovers of wisdom and not lovers of opinion.
Assuredly.
Specimen Questions
1 Explain Plato’s contrast, in the Republic, between examples of visible beauty and ‘the beautiful itself’. Why does he believe true knowledge must relate to the latter, not the former?
2 Why does Socrates think that knowledge and belief are distinct powers that apply themselves in distinct spheres or subject matters? Why is knowledge always about the stable, absolute and eternal?
3 Opinion (or belief) is located between pure being and absolute not-being so that it amounts to neither knowledge nor complete ignorance. How does Socrates argue for this claim and what does it tell us about the objects of opinion?
Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 Plato, Republic. Many translations are available, including F. M. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941) and H. P. D. Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955).
2 General introductions to Plato’s thought include J. C. Gosling, Plato> (London: Routledge, 1973), and A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (5th edn, London: Methuen, 1948).
3 For a useful guide to Plato’s Republic and in particular this topic, see G. Santas, Understanding Plato’s Republic, Ch. 7 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
4 There is an excellent account of Plato’s views on knowledge in J. Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
5 The nature of knowledge is discussed in many other works of Plato, especially the Theaetetus. A good starting point is F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1960). See also I. M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines, vol. II (London: Routledge, 1963); N. P. White, Plato on Knowledge and Reality (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976); R. Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. chs 6, 9.
6 In the following podcast M. M. McCabe and P. Adamson discuss Plato’s notion of knowledge: https://historyofphilosophy.net/plato-knowledge. For further related short podcasts on Plato by P. Adamson go to https://historyofphilosophy.net/plato-life.
7 For a couple of excellent online entries, see the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://www.iep.utm.edu/republic/ (by A. Coumoundouros), and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/ (by R. Kraut). See also the Stanford Encyclopedia entry ‘The Analysis of Knowledge’.
Notes
* Plato, Republic [Politeia, c.380 BC], Bk V, 474b–483e. Trans. B. Jowett, in The Dialogues of Plato (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892), vol. III, pp. 171–9.
